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Monday, October 17, 2011

Partnership

Sam making heel hooks look good

This weekend, I was fortunate to get outside three days in a row and do a good bit of climbing. On Friday, I worked a half day for Peregrine Climbing Guides with a student from the University of Alabama who has aspirations to be an instructor for the National Outdoor Leadership School. I also climbed with Chris Latham, co-owner of Peregrine Climbing Guides, on his skills in preparation for his upcoming American Mountain Guides Association Single Pitch Instructor Assessment. Finally, I got to do a bit of sport climbing with my good friend Sam Latone.While I was feeling good just to be climbing hard sport again after my surgery, Sam quickly dispatched a 5.12b on his first burn of the day. He redpointed it on only his second try, his first attempt six months prior. Given the large time span between the two attempts, I was more than impressed. He was quite stoked, and I was stoked for him.

Me making heel hooks look awkward

In honor of one of my favorite climbing partners and close friends, I've included a piece below that I wrote last spring before a trip out to Utah with Sam, Susan, and a few other folks. It's titled "Partnership."

“Why do you climb?”

And here we go again,
I thought. The same tired conversation
rehashed among every circle of climbers on the planet, from the gym to the
campfire to the online message board.
Opting out of this one, I sank back into the torn seat of the struggling
Volkswagen Jetta and allowed my gaze to follow the glowing white line on the
road. The distant horizon lay shrouded
in the blackness of the post-climbing nighttime. With my head cocked uncomfortably on my
shoulder, facing the window, buried in the seat, I half-listened out of my
exposed ear. I allowed my intimate focus
on the luminescent streak painted on the ground hurtling past me to lull my
drowsing body into a fitful doze.

In the back seat, Camille shifted, leaning forward
ever-so-slightly, adopting the posture of one unable to hear over the din of a
not-quite-well-maintained car barreling down the interstate at speeds well in
excess of the posted limits. I could
feel her posturing directly behind me as her entire body indicated her desire
for a pithy response to an otherwise superficial question. I sensed Sam’s eyes tracing over me from the
driver’s seat, assessing my mood.

The question was directed at no one in particular. Since no one in particular was answering, and
there were but three of us in the car, my vocal forfeiture left Sam alone to
tend to the curious, eager Camille and her inquiry.

“I climb because the rest of my life is too easy,” Sam
stated simply.

Intrigued, I imagine having cocked an eyebrow to myself at
this comment. In reality, I am quite
certain the only indication that my interest was piqued was in my continued
wakefulness.

“I mean that my life is too easy,” he repeated. “Look at how we live today. We have everything just laid out for us. There’s nothing left to survival
anymore. I guarantee that if I spent all
my time trying to find food and water, and building shelter, and fending off
wild animals, and all that stuff, I wouldn’t bother to go climbing. Not only would I not have the time, I
wouldn’t want to. It would be too dangerous and I would have
plenty of other stuff to keep me busy. I
wouldn’t need to go climbing.”

Need? I
thought. Maybe this conversation is going somewhere. Perhaps we really will discover my friend’s
intrinsic motivation to climb.

I realized it was my turn.
Sam’s statement demanded some kind of response. Our recently-concluded day marked Camille’s
second climbing experience, hence her question.
This left me to address Sam’s assertion that climbing reintroduced the
challenge of primal struggle into his life.
He addressed me:

“Hey, dude?”

I turned slightly toward the center of the car, rotating my
left shoulder a hair, raising my head so my chin stubble no longer snagged the
fibers on the collar of my t-shirt.
“Hmm…?” I intoned in the voice of one speaking from a world of
dreams. With that I returned to my
former repose.

Choosing not to vocalize a response, I felt simultaneously
that I agreed with Sam on some level while rejecting the entire conversation on
principle. The jackass in me was coming to light. Only a true climbing snob
would ignore this overplayed discussion that was likely a first-time experience
for all others involved. My willful
disinterest highlighted my unjustified contempt for what I considered
banal. At the moment, though, my
concerns were rather limited—sleep, and perhaps food.

The conversation soon turned to a discussion of the relative
merits of internet pornography, masturbation, feminism, women’s rights,
prostitution, and a host of candid disclosures about individual and collective
human sexuality.

* * *

Fast-forward nine months.
This was Sam’s final semester as an undergraduate and my final semester
in my master’s program. In precisely
seven days classes would resume for the spring, signifying the beginning of the
end. We intended to fill five of those
days with climbing. In a place like Alabama where the
five-year snowfall total was two inches, climbing was a fairly reasonable
expectation if the January weather cooperated.
Unfortunately, the weather pissed on us instead.

Mercifully, it did not piss on us in the way characteristic
of actual urine. This was instead much
colder. Nothing is so demoralizing as
rain with an ambient air temperature of 34 degrees Fahrenheit. The
subsequent decision to bail out was a much simpler one than if the temperature
had been favorable enough to somehow make palatable the idea of waiting for the
rock to dry.

Sam had recently returned from a semester at the National Outdoor Leadership
School, where the fires
of his unquenchable motivation were further stoked to truly begin his career as
a trad climber in earnest. I could not
have been more thrilled with this turn of events. Since moving to the state of Alabama, I had met
precisely six climbers who knew how to place gear. Three of these individuals climbed
predominantly on a top rope, I personally taught two of them how to place gear
(one of whom was Sam), and the remaining individual had recently skipped
town. In other words, Sam would be
featuring prominently as a potential partner in my immediate future.

As we drove home from our first official overnight trip
together, Sam renewed our long-extinguished conversation without warning.

“I want to tell you that I realized something since I’ve
been gone on the course: I was
wrong. I don’t climb because my life is
too easy. I climb because my life is too
hard. Climbing is how I get away and
relax. It helps me focus, because I
can’t not focus when I’m
climbing. I need that sometimes.”

Again, I did not have a response.

* * *

I can state with absolutely no reservation that Sam is a
bad-ass. Within one year of beginning
his climbing career, Sam was sending 5.11 sport lines, leading moderate trad,
and placing in the open division of bouldering competitions. More to the point: when Sam first began his venture into trad
climbing, he built his own rack. He
literally built it.

I was met with wonder when I watched as Sam’s rack emerged from
the depths of his pack the first time.
He had a pile of hand-tied shoulder slings and an assortment of nuts
made in the old-school way—by hand, in his basement. He had purchased a selection of machine nuts,
smoothed off the interior threads, and slung them with 5mm cord. Even more to my amazement, he proceeded to
place the aforementioned nuts in the rock and clip his slings to them with
booty carabiners. And then, both
impressed and dismayed, I watched as he climbed above them.

Something had to be done about this. While I respected Sam’s do-it-yourself
attitude, I was a bit concerned about what his do-it-himself style could do-to-himself if and when he fell. With some reluctance I dug through my trunk
of aging gear, consulting with my wife about particularly sentimental items,
attempting to recall the origins of each piece (if we even knew). By the end of the process, I had assembled a
Franken-rack of used but usable gear.
After stripping off all of the questionable soft goods, the perfect
hand-me-down beginner rack was ready.
The conglomeration included a set of solid-stem forged friends of
dubious origin, the largest and smallest tricams, half a set of nuts in roughly
every other size, three random hexes, a couple lockers that still mostly
worked, and a handful of carabiners with the word “Chouinard” stamped on the
side. Confident that I would, if forced,
climb above and maybe even fall on each and every piece of gear in the
collection, I presented Sam with the fruits of my labor.

Only later, right before leaving for his NOLS course, would
Sam stop by to thank me.

“I want you to know that the rack you gave me is more than
just a rack. It represents so much
stuff, man. I can just look at something
and try to climb it. With this, I can
climb anything—I can do
anything. It’s freedom. Thanks.”

Once again, I did not have an answer for Sam.

* * *

A few months later, Sam and I drove across the
country to Indian Creek, Utah, for nine days. Our training sessions were devoted to jamming our hands into a wooden crack trainer to the point of
bleeding in preparation for the anticipated sandstone splitters. Looking at the backs of my hands during those weeks, it was difficult for me to justify my obsession. Shaking hands was downright painful.

I informed Sam that I would be taping up my hands for future
training sessions. While we are both
generally opposed to the practice (mostly due to laziness on my part), I
informed him my ego was big enough to take the hit if it prevented my recently
acquired flesh wounds from growing ever larger.
After a few good-natured jabs at my expense, he said, “I may be scrappy
and strong, but you’re wiser. It’s a
good partnership.”

I certainly agree that it is a good partnership. But I still wonder who is actually wiser.